> Also, European culture is slightly different: most people consider a startup failure as something bad that you drag along for the rest of your career. This i

> Also, European culture is slightly different: most people consider a startup failure as something bad that you drag along for the rest of your career. This is a major issue in Japan too AFAIK. Working for a big corporation or the government is still considered superior to entrepreneurship, and failing at a company brings a lot of shame. Without permission to fail, it's impossible to succeed. As Elon Musk put it: "we're gonna have to blow up some rockets." I've wondered if the most significant innovation of the past 500 years and the one that led to our historic technological and economic explosion of progress wasn't just limited liability companies. In the past to do anything big you had to either be already rich (vastly limiting the pool), find a patron (again a small pool), or borrow money. In the old days borrowing was basically loan sharking. You'd end in prison, dead, or at best shamed and broken for the rest of your life if you failed to repay with interest. All that meant very few people could take risks, so very little innovation. Limited liability allows vastly more people to take risks. Yes it does lead to abuse, fraud, and waste, but it also leads to a huge amount of innovation since people have permission to take risks and fail and then recover. Failure at something like a startup still comes with costs. If you (the founder) are not a narcissist or a psychopath it will probably come with emotional costs like a feeling of failure and a feeling of having let people down. But it doesn't ruin your life, blackball you from your career, or land you in prison.